IntroductionVisitors and their cameras. I thought I’d finished with this topic awhile ago. Visitor photography had been the third part of my Tilting at Windmills series, along with those other betes noir “immersion” and “participation”. I also wrote a follow up post of links on visitor photography for those really interested. The debate continues unabated, and as full of opinion masquerading as fact as it ever was. It’s grown to such epic proportions that MuseumsEtc is publishing a volume on museums and visitor photography. So, once more into the breach…

The National Gallery case

The ostensible cause of the latest outburst was the National Gallery in London’s decision to allow visitor photography in August. One of the last “no photos!” bastions in Europe, the Gallery announced with no fanfare free Wi-Fi throughout the building, and tucked in with that announcement was a statement on their new photography policy.

“The introduction of free Wi-Fi throughout the public areas of the National Gallery is one of a number of steps we are taking to improve the welcome we provide.

“Wi-Fi enables our visitors to access additional information about the Collection and our exhibitions whilst actually here in the Gallery, and also to interact with us more via social media.

“As the use of Wi-Fi will significantly increase the use of tablets and mobile devices within the Gallery, it will become increasingly difficult for our Gallery Assistants to be able to distinguish between devices being used for engagement with the Collection, or those being used for photography.

“It is for that reason we have decided to change our policy on photography within the main collection galleries and allow it by members of the public for personal, non-commercial purposes -provided that they respect the wishes of visitors and do not hinder the pleasure of others by obstructing their views of the paintings. This is very much in line with policies in other UK museums and galleries.

“The use of flash and tripods will be prohibited, as will photography and filming in temporary exhibitions.

Within weeks, the chairman of the Arts Council, Sir Peter Bazalgette went on record supporting the idea of “selfie bans” for an hour a day, so people could get some relief from the hordes of picture snappers. And his was a fairly moderate opinion. The more absolutists were quite certain that doom was at hand.

Crowd Control 3CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 image by Flickr user Son of Groucho

Sarah Crompton, writing in the Telegraph, describes the typical scene that those opposed to photography paint; the swarm of unheeding photographers, ignoring the real to capture the facsimile. Walter Benjamin’s warning made manifest. “A man who concentrates before a work of art is absorbed by it… In contrast, the distracted mass absorbs the work of art.” Crompton’s experience is similar,

“The last time I was in MOMA in New York, I fought my way up to the floor where all the masterpieces by Picasso, Matisse and the Abstract Expressionists hang – and then fought my way back out again. The space was full not just of viewers but of photographers; it was impossible to stop, think and look at a painting amid the jostling crowds.”

In the face of that kind of scrum, can any meaningful interaction occur? Apparently not. She concludes,

“By allowing photography, galleries are betraying all those who want to contemplate rather than glance. Surrounded by the snappers, they may come to think that this is the acceptable way to consume art, a kind of constant grazing without any real meal.

That’s not a means of making art more popular or accessible. It is the surest path to depriving it of all purpose and meaning.”

Judith Dobrzynski, in an uncharacteristically moderate tone, agrees that a ban is needed. One hour’s a bit too short for her liking, though…

Virtually no major outlet reported the National Gallery’s decision as a win for visitors, or a positive outcome in any sense. Even in the field, there was little mention made of it. And it’s easy to see why. Other people taking pictures, especially selfies, is easy to mock. Rather than explain this at all, you should just go look at Josh Gondelman’s piece in the New Yorker, “Works from the Los Angeles Museum of Photographic Self-Portraiture”. Pretty genius, huh? You’re welcome.

Two thoughts about the National Gallery

So, why so much vitriol, and what could the Gallery have done differently? For the first question, Nina Simon’s already addressed it, so I’ll focus on the second. But, first, Nina.

Deal with the real problemNina tackles the National Gallery issue in a post, entitled, “Blame the Crowd, Not the Camera: Challenges to a New Open Photo Policy at the National Gallery” which unpacks the whole thing so neatly and completely that I won’t waste many more electrons on it. In the same way that “immersion” and “participation” get used as straw men for deeper issues, “selfies” have become the stand in for the real issue at the major art museums where this problem is most often highlighted – overcrowding.

Crowded Mona LisaCC BY-NC-ND 2.0 image by Flickr user Iris

Read any of the writers advocating photography bans, and you’ll find them all mentioning crowding as part of the experience that ruins it. I agree that photography exacerbates it and makes more apparent how unappealing crowding is, but I think that visitor photography gets the blame for a problem that’s much bigger and harder to tackle. The experienced arts consumers may have given up on crowding as an unfixable problem, but I think it’s worth problematizing, rather than just taking it for granted. I dislike going to MoMA, or the Louvre, not because of the amateur photographers, but because they are like Tokyo subway cars, with art. How one deals with overcrowding is a totally different question than how one deals with cameras, and a solution to that bigger problem, I think, would probably resolve the smaller one. The responses to her post are as well worth reading as the post itself, so devote some time to it.

Don’t make a lemon out of lemonadeLooking over the whole affair, I think the National Gallery made a classic public relations blunder, and turned what was an unalloyed accomplishment to be proud of (introducing free Wi-Fi throughout the building) into a major media fiasco for one reason. They didn’t ever come out and say they wanted visitors to use their cameras. They essentially said “It’s too hard to monitor, so we’re not going to.” And that doesn’t reflect well on them, despite the obvious truth of it. And they reaped the whirlwind for it…

It *is* hard to tell what people are doing with their devices. Is that person taking a picture, or are they far-sighted and holding the phone at arm’s length so they can read their wretchedly small screen? Are they telling all their friends what a blast they’re having at the museum, or just searching for a new song to listen to because they’re bored? They all look pretty much the same, and anyone who thinks museums’ front line staff (who tend to be the least well-paid hourly workers) should make these kinds of fine judgements dozens or hundreds of times per shift all the while keeping an eye on the objects, fundamentally doesn’t get it.

Realistically, I think institutions have to clearly allow, or disallow visitors to use their devices, and whichever way they decide, they need to own that decision, and have it reflect the core values of the institution.

I’m totally down with the National Gallery’s decision to allow visitors to use their devices, because I think providing free Wi-Fi was a good thing. Making it as easy as possible for visitors to access information about the museum and its scholarship should be a major priority for all museums. One way you do that is by knocking down as many barriers to access as you can. One of those barriers, particularly in art museums, is the amount of interpretation provided. I think my next Tumblr may have to be “Art museum visitors looking at Wikipedia because the label didn’t tell them anything they wanted to know.” The Gallery produces lots of information about their collection, and should be commended for making it easy for visitors to access it in a way that is visitor-driven. But in doing that, they should’ve come up with a reason to either encourage or discourage photography. Allowing it was a half measure, and putting that half measure in writing was a bad idea.

The Frick Example

It needn’t be that way. The Frick Collection in New York, had long been a no go zone for photographers. Like the National Gallery, they quietly reversed their photo policy in April, and a month later, reinstated a photography ban, saying this to Hyperallergic,

“After a brief trial allowing photography throughout the permanent collection galleries, it has become apparent we need to limit use of cameras to the Garden Court. The Frick Collection is virtually unique and especially valued for its lack of protective barriers, vitrines, and stanchions around works of fine and decorative art, displayed in a domestic setting. This refinement of our photography policy has been determined necessary to maintain the safety of our exceptional collections.”

And the hue and cry about this flip flop? Non-existant. The Frick totally owns their photography ban. It’s essential to the experience of seeing the objects in such a unique, unmuseum-y setting. They get full marks for being experimental enough to try to revise their policy. It shows they’re paying attention to what the outside world is like. And their reversal shows that they’re paying attention to the visitor experience and are willing to change based on evidence.

Mind your manners, not the technology

This evolving relationship with visitor photography and whether it’s good or bad has a lot to do manners and perceived lack thereof. The museums mentioned above both put explicit suggestions in their photo policies. The Frick’s used to read in part, “When taking photographs, please be courteous to other museum visitors by not blocking their views of artworks or impeding their movement through the galleries.” The National Gallery’s asked visitors not hinder the pleasure of others with their photography. But as Jillian Steinhauer wrote in Hyperallergic, when the Frick’s photography ban was dropped, “Pleas like these haven’t yet proven very effective, but maybe as photography in museums becomes less and less of an anomaly, we can shift our energy to figuring out how to do it right.”

Part of this dilemma also has to do with how we’ve conditioned ourselves to treat photography, no doubt based on older, analogue models of the process, when walking in front of a photographer meant possibly ruining one of a finite number of exposures on a roll of film that cost real money to buy and develop. Regan Forrest pointed me at an interesting dissertation that examined the visitor dynamics of photography in museums.

“It is the reflex action of trying to remove one’s self from, or trying to avoid the space between photographer and object. People duck and scuttle away, walk in reverse, stop and lean backwards or make an obvious decision to adjust their previously chosen path to circumnavigate the photographer and his or her line of vision to the object being photographed. Noticeably, the same behaviour does not occur if the viewer is not holding a camera in the process of taking a photograph. The viewer standing back from an artwork merely looking at it, is not afforded the same extreme actions of diversion as when a camera is involved. (Sager, J. F. (2008). The Contemporary Visual Art Audience: Space, Time and a Sideways Glance University of Western Sydney. pp174-175)

Our learned response to photographers is to give them wide berth, whether they ask for (or deserve) it. And we don’t seem to privilege looking at objects the same way. If you’ve had someone come stand directly in front of you to look at the object you’re looking at, you know the truth of this. And this where I think there’s really interesting room for engagement with our audiences.

Perhaps one of the best outcomes of all this angst will be some hard discussions around the visitor experience in museums and what factors contribute or detract from a good one. What should the current etiquette for museum-going be? What are the new rules of the road for having a rewarding experience engaging with our heritage? I’ll be looking at place like the Brooklyn Museum for inspiration.

Since this focused so much on the downsides of visitor photography, I’ll spend the next post looking at some positive examples of visitor photography in museums.

Like this:

Part One of this post dealt with some of the kinds of people movement in the field this year. This post will deal with one of the most exciting developments I’ve seen in years, the proliferation of grassroots efforts to educate, connect, and energize the field.

I gave a brown bag talk at Baltimore Museum of Art before the conference on “What skills will it take to survive in the 21st century museum and the how the heck is one supposed to get them while holding down a day job?”. What it really turned into was a long, roundtable discussion on how BMA works, what needs staff had for tools and processes and their hope that the perfect tools existed out there somewhere. I raised a few eyebrows, given my title, when I advocated that they refrain from email when a phone call or just walking over to a colleague’s desk would suffice. Ditto for suggesting a good project manager is more cost effective in the long run than any project managment package out there (Forgive me, Basecamp! I love you to bits and use you daily, but…).

You might think the talk was a bummer, but it was a lively talk, folks were engaged, and despite my inability to recommend any magic bullets, I think it was a valuable event, because they got to hear each other in ways that they mightn’t in their day-to-day work lives. They taught each other all kinds of things I couldn’t have, and together as a group they surfaced a lot of issues that are good to work on. I look forward to hearing how they fare.

The Computer Club model
I have these kinds of discusions a lot nowadays, which is odd. If you’d asked me three years what I saw myself doing, “Talking about informal professional development” wouldn’t have been a top answer. Yet, in my current role at PEM, it has come to occupy a lot my energy and thought. With the prolifereation of tools and platforms, it’s not surprising that most museum staff don’t feel able to make informed chices about how they might use them, or even whether to use them at all. For those us charged with using those platforms and tools to reach our museums’ audiences, and engage new ones, it makes for a neat dilemma. And one of the best ways I’ve seen to address it comes from the Imperial War Museum in London, where Carolyn Royston and Co. have started a low barrier-to-entry professional development program they call Computer Club. Read all about it here or check out this interview Suse Cairns did with Carolyn all about Computer Club.

Cool, or what? Image courtesy of Carolyn Royston

Here at PEM, we’ve taken that model and adapted it to fit our particular needs. We started with a specific social media emphasis, because we’d just launched a blog and there was an institutional imperiative to increase staff participation in PEM’s social media efforts. Since then, we’ve hosted a half dozen or so on topics like:

Social Media 101: What are social media and why does PEM care?

Our blog and blogging: What makes a good PEM blog post?

Twitter for Professionals

Facebook: How to interact with PEM on Facebook and spread the love

Digital Imaging: How to take better pictures with your phone

To say that there’s pent-up demand wouldbe a bit of an unerstatement. We routinely get 20-25 people from across the institution. And just like I saw in Baltimore, they came from across the museum, from entry-level to senior folks. Why isn’t everybody doing this? Developing and normalizing this kind of highly targeted peer-to-peer learning has great potential both to spread skills and energize staff. Microcredentialing or badging systems are hot stuff these days, and I’ve always been a bit of skeptic until now because I couldn’t see how you make the value case for it. In this case, though, it’s dead easy to see. Want to build a culture of learning? Here’s a way that’s low-overhead, staff-driven, and responsive to your needs. With just a little bit of input from your HR department, you could make a program where learners get recognized for attending, and those microcredentials figure into the annual review process. Must work on that…

The Drinking Continues
When I suggested having a Drinking About Museums: MW edition, some wag replied “Isn’t a conference just one big #drinkingaboutmuseums? Well, yes. Certainly, DAM started off as a desire to capture some of that “late night at the conference bar” magic. But it has also become more than that. It’s a bona fide international phenomenon, with chapters popping up all over, getting together, and sharing their passion for museums, meeting new colleagues and joining a larger, global community. Whether you’re a student thinknig about a museum career, someone working in a GLAM, or just a museum lover, it’s a great way to connect, learn, and grow.

So, we had an event at MW and got a bunch of about 30 DAM movers and shakers together. It was enormously gratifying to see all these folks who had started their own groups all in one place. The Godfather of DAM, Mr. Koven J. Smith, came up to me in the middle of it and said his typically understated way, “Look at this. We made something good.” And I have to agree.

DAM:MW Hall of Fame. There’s Koven and me in the back row, as is mete and right.

If you haven’t been to one, go. And if there isn’t one in your town, start one. And if you’re going to AAM2014, there’ll be *two* DAMs, so be warned!

The Italian Jobs – Sveglia Museo and Invasioni Digitali
Innovation happens all over, and this year, Italy is a hotbed of grassroots efforts to increase Italian museums’ connections to audiences using social media. Sveglia Museo is “an experimental project to help Italian museums achieve a better communication with their audience: the goal is to get them talking and tweeting with each other. The idea is to ask for advice from digital communication managers of foreign museums in order to “wake up” Italian museums, online and on social networks.” They’ve already generated a tremendous amount of buzz online, both for their ambition (getting government agencies with no budgets to take on more work is no mean feat!) and for their clever appeal to a global community of practice to help them. I wish them well, and so should you. It’s a worthy model.

The other Italian initiative is Invasioni Digitali or “Digital Invasions” Digital Invasions “are mobs of people who support museums and cultural heritage by ‘invading’ them and then documenting the experience on blogs and social media. Each ‘invasion’ is meant to create new forms of conversation about arts and culture, and to transform the cultural heritage into something that is ‘open, welcoming and innovative.'” It’s like Flash Mobs meet Drinking About Museums, with a service component. Genius stuff… If you know a museum or heritage site that’s laboring in obscurity, or could benefit from an injection of interest from a digitally savvy audience, then this model is for you. At our last Museums Showoff, one of the speakers gave an impassioned defense of her museum nd ended with an open invitation to come visit. Maybe instead of a visit, an invasion is needed!

And while I’m (profesionally) crushing on the Italian initiatives, they are by no means the only ones out there. Mar Dixon has launched an impressive number of Twitter campaigns around museum themes like #MuseumWeek and #MuseumSelfie. In fact, some enterprising soul could probably compile a Tumblr of these kinds of grassroots inititives and win the undying affection of museum social media managers the world over, myself included. Hint, hint…

The last part of this series will touch on issues that came up in my sessions around evaluation and access, and the maturation of the field.

March has been a busy month at work, and when that hasn’t been occupying my attention, CODE | WORDS has. Think lots and lots of phone calls, Google Hangouts, and collaborative editing of documents. It was therefore a wonderful break to escape to Baltimore for a few days for the Museum Computer Network board meeting and Museums and the Web 2014.

Museums and the Web 2014 has ended, and I am so glad I was able to attend! The sessions were excellent, the conversation lively, and I came away feeling energized and excited about what the coming year holds for us. There was so much going on that my attempt to unpack it in a nice, brief post failed before it even left outline form in my notebook. So, I’m going to have to spread it out based on the themes that emerged for me.

Comings…

After you’ve been in the business awhile, one of the reasons to go to conferences is to see who’s moved in, who’s moved up and who’s moved along. And there was plenty of two of the three. Which is both encouraging and discouraging.

Given the price tag of conferences these days, it is always a pleasure to see younger colleagues, and particularly students coming and participating. I had some great conversations and inevitably, a lot of “What should I do?” talks with people. Some of the things I found myself saying over and over again included the following observations.

I think Museum Studies certificate/degrees continue to become less of a differentiating variable, and more of a box to tick. The resumes I see will almost all have some kind of museum studies credential on them, so if you’re looking to stand out from a crowded field, that will only save you from the initial cull. All of the resumes I’ve seen in the past few months that really caught my attention had something else in them; a concentration in media studies, design courses, education, etc… Don’t get me wrong, I think Museum Studies credentials have merit, but I don’t think they’re enough to get you into the field. And if you’re just embarking on your career, getting in is all that matters, right? I’m also not suggesting getting even more degrees. Just look at your courses, and your peers’ courses and find that thing that’s going to make you stand out.

It’s nobody’s job to get you unstuck other than you. Can’t break into the sector? Can’t move on? Difficult boss? Visionless administration? Chronic understaffing/budgeting/resources? Whatever the problem, in the end, it comes down to you. Seeking outside advice and counsel is a great tool to helping you get clear about your goals, but it’s no substitute.

Stop thinking about where you want to work, and think about who you want to work with instead. Given the peculiarly public-facing nature of digital projects and products and the small size of the community, it’s relatively easy to look at interesting, innovative work and figure out who made it. They also move around, so if you focus on the museum instead of the person, you run the risk of applying somewhere where someone innovative used to work. Do your homework. Find examples of work that speak to you, figure out who made it, and find out where they are. Go to the conferences. I know they’re expensive, but most of them offer scholarships and/or volunteer discounts. Find them and ask them about their work. Very few people I know hate to be asked about the work they’ve done. It’s a great conversation starter.

It was a lovely pre-conference gift to hear in January that Nancy Proctor had been appointed Deputy Director for Digital Experience at the Baltimore Museum of Art. Nancy has been a friend and colleague for many years and it was heartening to see another colleague who combines a passion for museums with a deep understanding of digital technologies climb into the senior management ranks. I look forward to seeing what she’ll do in the coming years. There’s a lot to look forward to. The number of C-level positions like Nancy’s being created seems to be going up every year. And the pool of candidates is full of some of the brightest, most committed, thoroughgoing professionals you could ask for.

…and Goings

I only worry that the growth rate of CDO-type positions won’t match the rate of colleagues leaving the field. Some flux is inevitable in a workforce, but this year has been particularly turbulent, and mostly flowing out of the field and not so much in. A couple has turned into more than a handful very rapidly. I joked with someone that in a few year’s time, I’d find myself sitting alone at the bar at MCN or MW if things don’t change. It wasn’t a very pleasant picture. And I don’t know what to do, other than hope at this point.

That’s a bit of a downer, I realize, but one of the wonderful things about conferences is that they crystallize things. You start to see big pictures arise out of lots of little things. Sometimes it’s good, and sometimes not. But I’d always rather have specific fears than vague ones. The next post will be peppier and look at all the energy around grass-roots museum advocacy. There’ll be invasions, clubs, and drinking!

Confession time: I have a terrible sense of which posts are going to resonate and which aren’t. The last post is a perfect example. It was something I had been meaning to get off my chest for awhile and nothing more. Even after a coworker said, “That’d be great for the Museum’s blog!”, I remained unconvinced. Oh well…

The head scan

The other thing that always catches me by surprise it seems is how the strangest things you put out into the world will have life. My head scan, for instance. I did it mainly to test the scanner Don Undeen was using at the Met. I didn’t think so much of the resolution, but didn’t delete file luckily. I played with it as a way to explore TinkerCAD and the Shapeways 3D printing pipeline. When Simon Sherrin asked me for a copy, I figured I print one out for myself, mainly to see how long it took Shapeways to deliver and what their least expensive plastics looked like.

And then, things started to happen…

Simon’s action shot of mini Ed in progress.

Mini Ed awakes in Australia

Then the remixing starts…

The Drinking About Museums: Melbourne logo

Mashup! Mini Ed meets DAM:MELB

Then things get weirder…

Mini Ed goes to Drinking About Museums: Melbourne.

Miini Ed catches up w Mia Ridge, visiting from London.

And Mia decides to take mini Ed with her. So Traveling Mini Ed is off to London and Oxford, via Singapore. but first, he goes to some museums.

Mini Ed enjoying the National Gallery Victoria

We’ll have to see what else he gets up to. In the interim, my copy from Shapeways arrived.

Mini Ed 2.0 arrives in Salem, MA

He was a big hit around the office, and actually came in quite handy as a tangible example of what a 3D printed object was like. And then somebody suggested it for my social media headshot. So…